Q: Moushumi can find happiness A: b (false)

       Lahiri looks into how people feel about about the lives that they created for themselves in “The Namesake.” Gogol lives a content life now; he knows who he is and he knows what he wants. Yet Moushumi cannot tell what she wants in life or what kind of person she has become. Gogol, who will never leave Manhattan, finds a certain satisfaction with the stability and control he has in his life. But Moushumi can never really feel satisfied because she spends her time trying to escape from her life. For example, when she sleeps with Dimitri, the narrator explains how “the complication of it [calms] her” (266). She creates many separate lives for herself, each with a different version of herself, to create enough confusion so that she does not need to face what she fears the most: herself. She has a life with Gogol, a life in Paris, lives with Astrid and Donald, Dimitri, and her family. When she mentions how she might need to leave New York to get a job, the narrator explains how “There is something appealing to her about this prospect, to make a clean start in a place no one knows her” (254). Moushumi embraces these chances to make clean starts because she can continuously just find new ways to hide from the parts of herself that she does not like. She fears her lonely childhood and the prospect of loneliness, her mother’s dependence on her father, her cultures conservative lifestyle, and more. Moushumi’s constant hiding from herself forces her to live a false life; she can never really find the contentment of satisfaction that her friends and husband can because she does not actually know what she wants.